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Tuesday, February 7, 2017

MANAGEMENT SPECIAL............ Finding hidden leaders

Finding hidden leaders

Organizations
should learn to hunt, fish, and trawl for the best talent.

Searching for the next generation of business
leaders represents one of the biggest headaches for any organization. Most, in our experience, rely on
development programs that rotate
visible high fliers, emphasizing the importance of leadership attributes such
as integrity, collaboration, a results-driven orientation, and
customer-oriented behavior. Many, understandably, also look outside the
organization to fill key roles despite the costs and potential risks of hiring
cultural misfits.

Far fewer, though, scan systematically for
the hidden talent that often lurks unnoticed within their own corporate ranks.
Sometimes those overlooked leaders remain invisible because of gender, racial, or
other biases. Others may have unconventional backgrounds, be reluctant to put
themselves forward, or have fallen off (or steered clear of) the standard
development path. Regardless of the cause, it’s a wasted opportunity when good
leaders are overlooked, and it can leave individuals feeling alienated and
demotivated.

To identify promising candidates for
promotion who are not on the list of usual suspects, companies need to apply
more rigor and better tools than many currently use. Proactive efforts are the
key—think “hunting” as opposed to “harvesting” those who present themselves. In
this article, we describe the causes of the hidden-leader problem in more
detail and propose a few techniques for addressing it. Some are technology
enabled. And all are grounded in real-world experience like that of the global
head of organizational development and talent management at one of the world’s
leading pharmaceutical companies, who told us recently, “We have increasingly
been thinking about how to tap into our hidden leaders so as to unleash the
full potential of the organization in a more systematic way.”

The rewards can be significant. Expanding
a company’s leadership capacity is not only valuable in itself; it can be
inspirational for the hidden leaders who are elevated and for those around
them, bringing further benefits. As that same pharmaceutical-company executive
observed, “Inspired employees are productive employees.”

Why
leaders stay hidden

Most organizations we know have more
leadership power within their ranks than they recognize. Some individuals
quickly acquire reputations as rising stars and move up the ranks as if in a
self-fulfilling prophecy. Others, for a variety of reasons, may miss the fast
track. Some of these eventually leave in search of new pastures, while others
stay behind, without ever reaching their full potential. Either way, the
skills, knowledge, and energy they could bring to the company are lost. In our
experience, there are three common reasons why leaders get overlooked, none of
them easily overcome by the leadership-harvesting approaches prevalent at many
organizations.

Persistent
challenges

The first explanation is size: in large
organizations, it’s easy for hidden talent to stay hidden or be drowned out by
the noise of complex organizational processes. They could be in a business unit
far from the corporate center or in a backroom job away from the action. They
might be quiet and reluctant to push themselves forward, eclipsed by more
forceful personalities. Yet they may perform exceptionally well in their jobs,
collaborate effectively with colleagues, have extensive networks across the
organization, or carry informal influence among their peers. In short, they are
showing signs of leadership potential, but it remains untapped because they are
shielded from senior managers.

Another reason why
promising future leaders go unnoticed is bias in the selection process. As Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Carolyn Buck Luce, and Cornel
West have shown, bias can be consciously or unconsciously based on race,
ethnicity, or gender, or on age, when older employees are seen as past their
prime. A language “deficit,” or even a strong accent, has been known to cause
people in global organizations to be penalized, as has a failure to fit
conventional cultural norms. Sometimes it might be merely a one-off bad
experience on a project that taints a high-potential employee’s reputation. Or
it could happen to someone who steps off the conventional path for personal
reasons—for example, to have a child or care for an ill family member. Managers
in most organizations, notwithstanding efforts to encourage diversity and
inclusion, still tend to recognize, reward, and promote people who look and
behave like them and who have followed similar paths, while neglecting others
whose leadership potential may be equally impressive.

Finally, there is the problem of the
narrow top-down lens that senior leaders often use when looking for leadership
talent. Underlying this is the mistaken assumption that only those at the top
of the organization know what great leadership looks like, or a narrow focus on
leadership contexts specific to the organization and the particular role. This
can crowd out other perspectives, such as what individuals have achieved
outside the company or what people lower down in the organization see as
examples of effective leadership. A narrow lens can also interact in subtle
ways with bias, as was the case for the executive at a large technology company
who found it difficult to understand why a female manager wasn’t seizing more
opportunities to “demo” the company’s products at major events as he and other
senior leaders had done during their rise up the ranks.

Disappointing
harvests

Overcoming the obstacles of size, bias,
and narrow lens is a management challenge of the first order. In our
experience, the most common means of finding leaders in large
organizations—what we call harvesting—is not up to the task. Harvesting assumes
that the best, often with some help, will organically rise to prominence and
can then be plucked and placed into leadership roles. There are many varieties
of harvesting, but it essentially involves planting talented “seeds”—new hires—in
the organization, giving them increasingly demanding tasks, providing training
and support as they develop, allowing them opportunities to demonstrate their
abilities, and choosing the best performers for the senior roles. Managers who
do this best invest a large amount of time and energy in cultivation
activities. There is a lot of value in this, and harvesting should remain a
vital part of developing and selecting. But it does little to unearth hidden
talent, because hidden talent, by its nature, includes individuals who for some
reason are not on the standard advancement path and thus remain invisible to
those relying on conventional processes.

How to
spot your hidden leaders

Finding employees with the qualities to be
tomorrow’s leaders requires more than harvesting talent and should include what
we call “hunting,” “fishing,” and “trawling” . These approaches are more
proactive and involve, for example, turning over more stones than usual,
encouraging leaders to identify themselves, and finding new ways to tap into
the environments where people live and work.

Hunting

When potential leaders refrain from
identifying themselves or fail to follow a conventional path up the
organizational ladder, companies have to look actively for them. One simple but
effective approach is for managers explicitly to scan for promising individuals
in their unit who are not currently on a list of high potentials. This forces
them to shed at least some of their existing biases. It can pay to be
specific—targeting, say, people who have demonstrated strong performance in a
particular area. Once they have been identified, the next step is to devise a
tailored approach for developing them. For example, a division leader at a
global industrial-products company, when shown an all-male slate of potential
leaders, sent managers back to their departments with an explicit mandate to
discuss leadership opportunities with female employees, an exercise that
produced several high-quality leaders who had not been recognized before. At a Chinese
bank, senior leaders conducted a systematic review of all employees against key
characteristics and leadership potential to match their compatibility with open
positions and forced a ranking for each position. That effort helped the bank
identify both hidden and more established leaders.

Technology increasingly supports a hunting
mentality. Many personnel databases are sufficiently robust to enable scans of
employees’ educational and training background, their work history, and
leadership experiences outside the organization. Patterns often emerge, such as
people with solid credentials who had a bad experience and never recovered,
people who had a strong start but did not continue to grow, people with skills
that have not been recognized or applied in the organization, or people
adversely affected by the experience of working with a particular manager or in
a particular part of the organization.

Google has led the way in using data to
understand leader and team performance and to apply those lessons to identify
and develop capable leaders. Over time, as sophisticated people analytics go
mainstream, all organizations will be able to hunt more effectively. In the
meantime, if existing databases won’t support strong pattern identification,
there are work-arounds. A European bank we know is contemplating asking its
employees for a waiver to access social-media data so as to better populate
their HR database, which is currently of such poor quality that it cannot hunt
for hidden talent.

Fishing

If hunting is about proactively using new
approaches to seek out hidden leaders, fishing involves using “bait” that
encourages them to identify themselves. One idea we’ve seen work is to offer
awards for atypical performance such as innovation or quality control. Awards for
inspirational leadership (designed specifically for people who are not in
formal leadership roles), for problem-solving skills (restricted to
nonmanagers), or for global collaboration are all ways to root out unsung
talent.

After years of rapid growth and a
harvesting approach to leadership selection, LinkedIn discovered that it was
promoting people with highly similar profiles. Earlier this year, it launched
its Quiet Ambassadors program to help identify introverted leaders who do not
fit the typical profile harvesters had been looking for in the past. While
conventional wisdom has often associated extroversion with leadership skills,
we know that quiet leaders can be equally effective. Highlighting these less
common characteristics, along with the special recognition, encouraged
introverts at LinkedIn to raise their hands. With the success of its first
pilot, the company is rolling out the program more broadly in 2017.

Adecco, the global workforce-solutions
provider, has been running its CEO for One Month program since 2011, initially
at the local level and globally since 2014. The program offers work-based
training opportunities for young people as the best way to help them boost
their employability and step onto the career ladder. It soon revealed itself to
be a great system to fish for hidden leaders outside the company, but the
approach could work equally well to target an internal audience. In 2016, CEO
for One Month elicited more than 54,000 applications, many of them highly
talented young people. Regional selected candidates shadowed the Adecco country
managers for a month, while the global CEO for One Month shadowed Adecco’s CEO,
Alain Dehaze. The program has proven to be a gateway to future professional
success, becoming also a highly successful talent-acquisition model, with
several candidates hired at the local and group level.

Successful fishing depends on choosing the
right bait, knowing what leadership attributes are needed, and designing a
program accordingly. It’s counterproductive to arouse the expectations of
leadership candidates only to discover that they don’t meet the company’s
needs.

Trawling

A third way to spot hidden talent is to
dig more deeply and more broadly into employees’ work environments—something we
call “trawling.” Doing this assumes that leadership capabilities are sometimes
more apparent to peers and subordinates than to those at the top of the
hierarchy. A low-tech approach, crowdsourcing at its most basic, is to ask
people within the organization to nominate colleagues who have particular
talents, then interview those nominated so as to find out more about their
potential leadership strengths.

A more sophisticated approach uses
social-network analysis to draw an accurate portrait of the real social
networks within organizations, which tend to be quite different from the formal
roles and processes written down on the organization chart. Some companies use
employee surveys to determine which individuals play vital and influential
roles in helping the organization to function effectively, regardless of their
official positions. Once leaders know who these people are, they can assess
their broader potential. After a merger, the executives of one global
consumer-goods company provided data on their interactions with colleagues, such
as who they contacted for which purpose, who provided the support they needed,
and who inspired them in their daily work. The analysis revealed “super
connectors” scattered across the organization who did things differently, such
as participating in activities outside work, listening carefully, helping
others, and networking externally.

Social-network analysis
with “snowball sampling” (two-
to three-minute surveys that ask participants to identify others who should
take part in the research) is also a tool that can identify people most likely
to catalyze—or sabotage—organizational change.

An American company that recently acquired
a Japanese medical-devices business used a form of trawling to help determine
what talent to retain from the target enterprise. It asked everyone to select
up to ten people they trust and respect. The list of influencers identified in
the survey was cross-referenced with annual review scores and sales performance
(for sales reps). The positive influencers, some of whom had been under the
radar previously, were offered leadership roles in the new organization.

Nothing here is intended to replace the foundational
work of leadership development—notably a well-defined leadership model, widely
adopted performance-management systems, and the support, feedback, development
opportunities, training, leadership coaching, encouragement, and difficult
conversations that great leaders bring to their roles. The three approaches
suggested here—hunting, fishing, and trawling—should augment those existing
activities and can be used in conjunction with one another or independently.
Organizational leaders will first want to consider what is culturally
acceptable and technologically feasible and should test different approaches
and refine them as they learn.

By acknowledging that overlooked leaders can be
identified through more proactive efforts, executives should be able to reshape
their leadership culture, increase the available talent, save on recruiting
costs, and raise retention rates. Higher levels of engagement, greater
entrepreneurialism, and a more inclusive culture are less quantifiable but no
less valuable benefits